It turns out that drawing Nyan Cat on the VCS is fairly tricky. This thing uses all graphic objects the TIA is able to produce, including the missiles and ball for the tail, left edge and cherries on the tart.
The cherries were the last thing to go in, since I didn't have enough CPU time to change COLUPF to red and back to blue without messing something up, and still have time to read/write the HMBL/ENABL values.

As for the music, its rapid pace seems to help mask how wonderfully out of tune everything is. I attenuated some of the nastier notes, especially in the bass line. Oh, and the bass and drums have to share the second channel of course :)

Haha, I'm so happy you did it. When I saw the first Nya<enter suffix> here I said to myself: Gotta do it on VCS...

Fortunately I didn't even start. I would not have survived to be excelled, by somebody else releasing it first" :-)

You could save some cycles by copying the data to the ZP during VBLANK and using "LDA ZP,Y" instead of "LDA (ZP),Y". Also by tweaking the colors, you could re-use the color values for the "ENAx" bits like "LDA #$8A:STA COLUBK:STA ENAM1". Aaah, coding VCS soooo nasty.

Excellent!
I think it takes some knowledge of the 2600 to truly appreciate just how tricky this is.
I still haven't figured out exactly what is drawn using which TIA-object, but it comes together nicely! :)

I might not be wise to the specifics of Atari 2600 but at work we used to joke that lazy programmers "should be sent to an Atari 2600 programming camp in Siberia". That was probably not without reason. Kudos! And as for the whole meme thing.. I actually like this one ;)

Awesome work!
I was surprised on how much detailed stuff you managed to squeeze out to go with the PF :)
It's really hard to keep sane proportions with the VCS graphics.
Cool job with the music as well.

Exin: I assume you mean the rainbow tail, which would mean moving the cat/tart right. The problem with that lies with how playfield graphics work.
ATM I'm using a repeated playfield, which means I'd have to move the thing 4*(4+8) = 48 pixels to the right, landing the thing almost on the right edge of the screen.
With a reflected playfield I could reduce that to 32.
However, reflecting the playfield would mean I don't have time to clear the rainbow graphics in PF2 before it's drawn again for the right side, meaning the rainbow colors would bleed into the tart.